We love to travel, and love having a local show us their home country. At YourTrip, all of our guides are locals who have a passion for sharing an authentic experience with visitors to their country. In this article, we explain why we love using local guides for all our tours and how this makes travel a better experience for everyone.

Locals know stuff about their home

Picture yourself waking up on a Saturday morning in Melbourne waiting for that great coffee from your local barista. You walk in, they know your name and order, and within minutes you’re reading this article while sipping on a lovely latte. Your phone rings and your friend from Sydney wants to know where to get a great coffee as they are in town today. Naturally, you tell them about your local café and the great coffee and food they serve up. You know this because you live here and you know stuff about your home town. The same applies with our local guides – they live there and know stuff about where they live.

They get to know you

Not everyone likes the same thing, just like coffee. Some people like a long black, others a latte and some a ‘salted caramel mocha frappucino’ just to name a few. The same applies to travel – some people love seeking adventure while others love a great viewpoint for an amazing photo. A local guide will get to know you during the course of an itinerary and work out what you’re really interested in. As they know the local area, they’ll quickly get you to places that you’re interested in, saving you time and making your experiences more unique. Your guide will learn your travel style to ensure your journey matches your expectations.

Improvise – make the most of the unexpected

The best laid plans can sometimes be just that… plans. Life can throw us unexpected surprises – some good, some not so good. A local guide can improvise to make the most of the unexpected. It might be as grand as yesterday when you were really interested in a local artists work, so the next day the guide takes you to meet the artist. It could also be something like a local event closes the main road, so your guide navigates you around the traffic quickly to get to where you want to be. Local guides are flexible and intuitive to improvise to ensure they can share their home country with you.

Hometown Pride

Guides generally don’t become guides to get rich quick. They do it because they love people and are proud of their home. Sharing experiences in your hometown is always exciting, and our guides are excited to share their home towns with you. They’ll be honest with you about what is worth seeing, what they normally do and what is overrated or overcrowded. They want to make a great impression on you, so you go home speaking highly of their hometown. Pride and passion are key attributes that make local guides a step above any other guides.

Keeping it local

We think it’s really important to support the communities that you visit. Driving a bus into town, offloading everyone with packed lunches and then steaming out of town again doesn’t do much for the local economy. Local guides live and work in the regions they call home. Using a local guide means their salary and any tips they receive stays in their local communities. Local guides are also more likely to take you to the mum and pop restaurant for lunch and get you a cold beer at a local bar rather than dine at big chain resort. The connection with the local community allows visitors to pay it forward to the local community for the great time they’ve had visiting.

There are just a few reasons why we love using local guides everywhere we go. Once you’ve travelled with us, you’ll never look back and will demand a local guide everywhere you travel.